


Wealth of Knowledge

by rocknrollalien



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon, no canon characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-18 15:35:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2353541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rocknrollalien/pseuds/rocknrollalien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maxien Aledonis was an under cover cop on Palaven, assigned to the nearly impossible task of proving corruption in one of the most esteemed Generals alive. His team died, but he got the job done, and impressed enough people with his handling of the situation that he has been promoted to Spectre status by the Council.</p><p>Meanwhile, the threat of an extremist religious group called Agerae is building in the galaxy. As the group routinely makes planets inhabitable, kills relentlessly, and does everything in their power to weak everybody but themselves, the galaxy is beginning to fear the Great and Terrible Prophet of the Great and Terrible Beast of which the Agerans speak.</p><p>(This is an entirely original plot, populated with an entirely original cast, set in the Mass Effect Universe. It takes place several years before any canon events, and will not interact with canon plotlines at all. The story will follow a similar format to the game as far as combat and mission structure.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Maxien would forever be mildly uncomfortable in hoodies. The baggy fabric constantly felt like it was on the verge of snagging on something in his surroundings. After years in boot camp and police academy, he’d come to favor uniforms whenever possible. Armor was even better, but he knew he couldn’t just run around armed to the teeth without rousing suspicion.

As he tugged at the strings of his hoodie, Kaligaren shuffled closer. The smaller turian offered a smile of assurance, and placed a hand on Maxien’s arm.

“You know damn well you can’t show fear,” Kal said, his ice blue eyes flicking toward the door of the warehouse.

Maxien Aledonis was barely 24 years old. Fresh out of camp, having hardly left home, he had been assigned to an impossible task on behalf of the Palaven police. He, and a small team of similarly young turians, had been tasked with going undercover to investigate corruption in one of the most esteemed members of their society.

He still didn’t understand why he’d been chosen. He’d done well in camp, going so far as to receive some small Spectre training, but good scores in simulations didn’t exactly qualify him for the covert operation of the century. Anteia, his other partner besides Kal, had suggested that perhaps they were just a particularly shady looking bunch.

Maxien still felt his breath coming in fast, despite Kal’s well-timed advice.

This was it. After a year of being under cover, forging criminal records, masquerading as smugglers, they had finally arranged a meeting with Val Iulian in person. As soon as he stepped through the doors and attempted to purchase their weapon mods at a premium, they were going to arrest him. They would be heroes. Still, nerves racked Maxien’s body, keeping his mandibles pinched tight and his hands in fists.

If they screwed up, and if Iulian managed to get the upper hand, they could easily be arrested for their falsified smuggling operation.

Since Iulian was one of the most respected Generals on Palaven, and was next in line to be the Patriarch, he had access to all police files and money allotment reports. Maxien’s team, by necessity, had to be so completely under cover that no files of their assignment existed. After all, if Iulian caught wind that he was under investigation, all their leads would shrivel like a human without an enviro-suit on Palaven.

Things had to go exactly as planned, or it was very possible that a year of work had been entirely in vain. It would be in his superior’s best interests to claim to have no knowledge of the operation, so that they could easily assign another team to strike at Iulian when his guard was down. So Maxien, Kal, and Anteia’s heads were on the line.

The door to the warehouse opened, revealing two thugs with weapons at their hips.

“Where the fuck is he?” Maxien slurred, falling into his customary criminal slouch. “We already fuckin’ told you we only deal with the man with the credits.”

One of the thugs scoffed, touching his weapon as he scoped out the warehouse, looking for potential assailants in the shadows of the boxes.

“You really think you’re callin’ the shots at this point, big guy?” the other said, smirking.

“Seein’ as we’re the ones with the product, then yeah, I think we’re callin’ the shots,” Kal growled.

Anteia remained silent. They had found early on that the scumbags of Palaven tended to take women less seriously than men, but as long as Anteia remained silent, gun in hand, looking menacing, nobody tried anything on her. She looked as stoic as they came as she stood there, assault rifle cradled comfortably in her hands. Maxien didn’t know how she could transform from the laconic jokester to the menacing thug she was on the job.

One of the thugs spoke into his visor, declaring the warehouse “Clean” of danger. Maxien felt his stomach tighten, and had to actively force his body to relax. This was the moment.

Val Iulian stepped into the warehouse, as commanding as ever, checking his omni-tool for the time as though this were just par for the course in his busy life. His green eyes pierced through the semi-dark of the warehouse, looking directly into Maxien’s, and Maxien felt like he could puke.


	2. Val Iulian

He still couldn’t understand how things had gone so wrong. He sat on the floor, staring at the disgusting beige walls of the room he’d been stuffed in days previously. They’d fed him once, since he’d been there, trying to play nice cop. This hadn’t lasted long, as he’d refused to talk. They wanted the name of his superior. They wanted to know who had the gall to investigate Iulian. They wanted to know everything.

Maxien was weak, and dizzy, and angrier than he had been since his childhood. His plots to escape his situation were only interrupted by fantasies of food and of rage. He refused to talk. He wouldn’t even tell Iulian’s agents his name. Even when Iulian himself came down to interrogate him, full of suave and charm, Maxien did nothing but spit on the man’s shoes. He had been investigating Iulian as a job, nothing more, but now he hated the man more than he had hated anything in his life.

His face hurt. It had been seriously battered in the--how many days had it been?--since the showdown at the warehouse. Good cop hadn’t lasted, but they hadn’t exactly given up on bad cop yet. If he’d looked shady before, the scars on his left eye only enhanced things. He missed food. And bathing.

“Are you hungry?” came a voice from outside the door. “We’ll bring in some food if you agree to cooperate!”

It was a woman speaking. It was the first time a woman had come down to see Maxien. He wondered what their game was.

“And if you don’t cooperate, we’ll ruin your prettyboy face once and for all, kid,” came a male voice.

Ah. Good Cop/Bad Cop. Hardly interesting.

“We’re opening the door now!”

    The door slid open, revealing a beautiful turian woman and yet another thuggish man. Maxien had begun mentally critiquing the variety of individuals that Iulian sent to him, becoming more and more jaded with the entire effort to get him to talk. He didn’t know how he was going to get out, yet, but he knew that he would rather die than become a traitor. If he ratted on his superior officer, it would be like ratting on Kal and Anteia. It would be like ratting on his own parents. He couldn’t--no, wouldn’t--bring himself to be so despicable.

Maxien stood as they entered, standing at attention. Not out of respect, but to show that he was made of steel. His eyes stared at his interrogators with silent, cold hate as he tried to ignore the smells of the food on the tray that the woman brought in.

They began to speak to him, but he found that he had finally learned to tune them out. It was almost peaceful. He wondered if he should be using this time to plan his escape. His eyes flicked to the pistol on the hip of the tall turian in front of him. He noted that the woman had a rifle slung over her back, as casual as they come.

When the real interrogation started, the food was put aside, and the thug took out his gun. Rather than shooting Maxien and having the whole business done with, he whipped Maxien’s face with the barrel. As he wound up for another whack, Maxien’s body reacted quicker than his mind could. He snatched the pistol from the thug’s hand, and shot him in the throat before he could even formulate a plan of how to dodge the oncoming attacks.

The woman took out her assault rifle, but she fumbled with it, and ended with a bullet in her head.

Maxien stood, stunned at his own actions. Their blood leaked onto the floor, and his breath was coming in shallow. He was too dizzy to comprehend what had just happened. His body acted again, for his own benefit, grabbing the pastry from the tray and stuffing it in his mouth. He gorged himself on the food, and sat in the cell for a few moments longer, collecting himself.

He knew what he had to do.

He took the pass key from the woman’s hip, the rifle from her hands, and kept the pistol ready. Once out of the cell, he looked around, mildly bewildered. A bag had been over his head upon his entry, so he had no actual idea of where to go. Besides up. He’d heard footsteps over his head for the past week, so he knew there were places above him to go. Logically, this illegal prison compound would be underground, and easily defensible. Iulian had mentioned off hand that he didn’t want Maxien to get “stolen away” so he could only assume that it was guarded against the outside, not the inmates.

He wandered, for a while, finding medi-gel in one of the cabinets in what he could only assume was a break room. He ransacked the place, looking for armor beyond the flimsy shirt and pants he was clad in, but found nothing. He would have to do this in his skivvies, more or less.

The first person to find Maxien wandering about was as unprepared as the interrogators. Two clean shots to the chest took the guard out, and Maxien kept moving. The next was prepared--the gun shots must have been heard all around the building by this point.

As bullets whizzed past him, he ducked behind a wall, peeking through the causeway to determine how many enemies awaited him. Six armed men, behind reasonable cover.

“Shit,” he murmured under his breath. Kal had been the one to ace battle strategy. He didn’t know the smart way to do this. So he did it the only way he could.

He peeked out of cover, and waited for the men to rise from their own cover to shoot at him. Using the assault rifle, he sprayed bullets until they dropped down to cover again, upon which event he also ducked back down. His assault rifle was over heating, fast. And the more he fired, the less accurate it became. If he hadn’t been so tired, he would have remembered this basic stuff from training, but instead he’d acted like some kind of 15 year old idiot.

He slung the rifle over his back, and took out his pistol. He looked it over, closely, and noted with relief that it had a scope on it. Sniper rifles had always been his favourite. He had steady hands, and could handle the kick. And his aim was shit without the scope, anyway.

Laying on the ground, he tampered with the scope a bit to his liking. Fortunately, the men on the other side seemed to be at least moderately afraid that Maxien would use his bullet spray method once more, and failed to be storming forward. He took a deep breath, and put his eye to the scope.

Five were dead before the pistol over heated, rendering it unable to fire. He swore quietly, and tucked the pistol away. He couldn’t keep overheating his weapons like that. The time between cooling down and being usable again was easily the time it took for someone to kill him.

Grabbing his assault rifle, he stormed out into the room, leaping over the cover that sheltered the final man, and shot him square in the face. The perimeter was clear, as far as he could see, and he needed to take the moment to rest. Two meals in seven days, as it turned out, did not provide lasting stamina to take out an entire building on one’s own. Who would have suspected?

Maxien, having gathered himself, moved among the bodies of the men who had been shooting at him less than five minutes ago, looking for armor that would fit. He managed to equip a mis matching amalgamation of semi-fitting clothes. He looked down at himself, shaking his head at the camo print on his legs, and knew that he wouldn’t be winning any fashion competitions on his way out. Still, the armor provided kinetic shields, which meant that one bullet wouldn’t kill him.

Unfortunately, the team that had been sent out to control him still didn’t have any sniper rifles. He reflected that it was unlikely that he would be able to get sufficient cover to use a sniper rifle effectively, but he would have still liked to have one on hand.

It wasn’t long before he was able to find a stairwell. The pass key opened the door for him, much to his relief, and he was able to move onto the second level. With shock and dismay, he realised that this complex wasn’t a complex so much as it was...a house. Iulian’s estate was home to a secret, very illegal prison in it’s basement? Maxien was disgusted.

The first floor was meant to be a living area, it seemed. There was a large vid screen against the wall, a window with the curtains drawn, and plush couch. It looked imported--human, even. There had been rumours that Iulian had been a human sympathiser in their First Contact War, but even in his deliriously drained mental state, Maxien couldn’t exactly put the two and two together. He wandered through the first floor, rifling through book cases aimlessly, wondering if there were more to fight, wondering if he could find anything properly incriminating against Iulian.

He was luckless, until he came across a hallway with a single door at the end. In front of the door was a lazy guard, caught up in a dirty magazine until he heard Maxien’s footsteps. The guard was quicker on his feet than most had been, and got enough shots in to take down Maxien’s shields before he could dive behind a book case.

Breathing quickly, he tried to buy time for his shields to recover, hearing steps approach the book case he had sheltered behind. Rapidly swearing under his breath he stood and faced the guard. It took three shots to lower his shields, but one round to his forehead was enough to topple him after that.

Maxien allowed himself a deep breath, and stepped over the body of the guard in order to find whatever secrets he had died to protect. He found an office, ripe with data pads and encrypted files. He stepped back out to the guard, and snatched the man’s omni-tool so that he could download everything he found there. He hoped beyond all hope that this was enough physical evidence to prove that Iulian was not all that the Palaven people thought he was.

Maxien moved through the house, finding another stairway that lead to the bedrooms and kitchens of the home. He recited what he knew about Iulian’s personal life in his head, attempting to guess where in the house he would be, and if he would be home at all. He knew that Iulian was unmarried, with no children. That was good, Maxien did not want to traumatize anybody by arresting their father before them. Iulian frequently went on patrols to the various outposts, but spent his free time at his estate or with the current Patriarch.

It had been a week since Maxien had been taken. Iulian would still be on leave. Good.

Iulian was in his bedroom, fully dressed, and fully armed. His arms were crossed behind his back as he stood straight and tall--the very picture of what a turian hoped to be. He had a noble face, with long, sweeping crests, and a faint scar searing his right mandible. His leaf green eyes appeared unsurprised as Maxien stormed in.

“You made it,” he said, smiling slightly.

“I’m...arresting you,” Maxien said, panting the words out more hesitantly than he’d envisioned in his head.

“See, I can’t let you do that. You do understand that the press would go simply mad, yes?” His voice was so calm, so patronizing.

“What are you going to do, resist arrest?” Maxien replied, incredulous.

“You could say that,” Iulian said, gently unholstering the pistol at his waist.

Maxien ducked behind the desk faster than he’d expected himself to. Still, a bullet grazed his shields--too close for comfort. Iulian calmly walked around the desk, gun ready, and Maxien knew that he did not have long. The assault rifle he’d stolen from the Good Cop leapt into his hands, and Iulian walked around the desk to be faced with a chest full of lead.

At close range, Maxien had discovered, it did not matter how inaccurate your gun was.

He sank onto the floor, next to the shattered corpse of General Val Iulian, and thought very seriously about going to sleep.


	3. Mother Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact! The title of this chapter is a direct reference to "Mother Night," a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The novel is about an American in Nazi Germany, who is contacted by the Allies to get cozy with the Nazis in order to send out coded messages over his radio show. However, after the war, his Ally contact seems to have disappeared, and there's no record of him ever having worked with the Allies, so he is tried as a war criminal.

“State your name for the record.”

“Maxien Aledonis.”

“Maxien Aledonis, you are being tried for the crime of killing General Val Iulian in his home one month ago today. How do you plead.”

“Not guilty.”

Maxien stood in front of the small jury without a lawyer, and without a leg to stand on. He knew that there was zero documentation of his assignment to investigate Iulian. He knew that the evidence he had gathered as far as Iulian’s corruption was considered inadmissible based on the fact that he had had no warrant to gather it. He knew that he was going to jail for his entire life, if they did not choose to give him the death sentence on principal.

At least he would have food.

The jury drilled him with questions. He answered them as calmly as he could, simply awaiting the inevitable sentencing. Yes, he had killed Iulian. No, it was not murder. Yes, he claimed that Iulian had been resisting arrest. No, he did not have any paper trail to back up his claims that he had been assigned to the case. Yes, the rest of his team had died.

On the stand, he did his best not to think of his team.

How stupid Kal had been. He’d panicked, and drawn his weapon far too soon. Yes, they had been threatening Maxien. No, Maxien did not anticipate Kal’s leap in front of him, only to get gunned down. Kal had been dead before he hit the floor. Maxien had simply stood there, too shocked to move, as Kal’s blue blood spattered across his chest. It had been surprisingly warm.

Yes, he insisted that the thugs were in the employ of Iulian. The thugs that had riddled Anteia with holes. She had fought back with more ferocity than Maxien had expected. She managed to kill one of the thugs before she hit the ground and a bag was thrown over Maxien’s head. At least he hadn’t had to watch her die, as well.

No, he did not claim that Iulian had approached him for the intial deal.

As the jury began to confer amongst themselves, the door to the court room opened. Maxien did not feel the need to look up, instead studying with intensity the grain of metal used on the stand. He did not wish to see the jury’s faces as they condemned him.

“I believe the accused has the right to a character witness,” came a familiar voice.

Maxien’s head snapped up, lightning fast, to see the chief of Palaven Police. She stood at the door, hip cocked to the side, a satisfied expression on her face.

“Sorry I’m late, I had to retrieve some files,” she announced, tossing several data pads onto the desks of the jury.

“State your name for the record,” droned the secretary of the court.

“Laelonia Sevecolus, Maxien’s commanding officer.”

There was a small gasp from the jury.

“I assigned Maxien to this case myself. All the files you’ll need to verify this are directly in front of you, ladies and gentleman. You’ll find a detailed explanation of Aledonis’s cover, mission, and exactly how he was told to go about things. You may have a moment to peruse these files, of course, but as a character witness I also vouch for this young man’s integrity and complete lack of murderous intent.”

Later, when the case had blown over and Maxien’s name had not only been cleared but awarded several commendations and medals, he would remember Laelonia’s testimony as proof that there was still order in the galaxy. That good people were rewarded and bad people were brought down. He was so thankful to her for restoring his faith in the semblance of logic he’d believed his life to have.

Even with logic restored, however, Maxien found that a sense of justice had not been returned to him. He was being lauded as a hero, after all. That was not fair. Kal had been a hero. Anteia had been a hero. Maxien had not sacrificed himself for another--he had not done anything to earn the esteem that had been awarded. If Kal had not leapt, if Anteia had not shot, then Maxien would be dead. Just perhaps, if he had died, Kal and Anteia would have been the ones to take out Iulian. Perhaps, if he had died, Kal and Anteia would be in consideration for Spectre status.

The bodies of his friends hadn’t been found, Laelonia had told him. It made sense, logically, that Iulian would have hidden the bodies, to put himself as far as possible from the event. It failed to make sense with any form of justice. Maxien was bitter that, after all they had done for him, he couldn’t even visit their graves.

He knew, in his core, that he would have to honour their memory--their sacrifice--in some way. He knew, beyond all else, that he would never forget them. He would never forget the splash of blood hitting his chest. He would never forget the cry of shock and pain as his comrades were pierced with bullets.


	4. Distress Call at Braccia Outpost

The Zelazny was a solid ship. It was small, relatively stealthy as far as heat emissions went, and slightly outdated. There was a man at the helm, an elderly engineer watching the engine, and a gunnery chief in case a disaster struck. Maxien was glad to have a skeleton crew. It gave him space to breathe--a luxury on a military ship.

He stood at the galaxy map, staring at the holographic display of the stars and nebulae. He’d always marveled at the Milky Way, and how easy it was for galaxy maps to shrink it down to something comprehensible. Maxien found peace in the stars. At least they, despite anything else, were the same. That kind of stability comforted him.

A high keening came out of the unmanned communications console next to the galaxy map, spurring Maxien to abandon his thoughts of the stable galaxy in favor of surprise at the noise. He stepped over to the console, checking around him to see if anybody else was about to answer the call. Upon realisation that he was alone on the bridge, he played the message.

A vid was displayed mid air, startling Maxien once more. The signal was shaky at best, and the sound was cutting out, but it was pretty clear that something was going wrong. Maxien saw three turians, one facing the camera, the other two clearly shooting at something off screen.

“--eed assistance! --tack!” panted the turian, cautiously glancing over his shoulder as bullets whizzed past his head. Maxien could hear screaming. “Evac im--sible! Shuttles we--taged!”

Maxien was working fast. He wasn’t an expert on communications consoles, but he knew the basics. He was able to track the signal to Braccia Outpost, and determine that it had been sent out only fifteen minutes previously. Leaping back to the galaxy map, he plotted a course for Braccia Outpost.

“Gunnery Chief,” Maxien called over the comm. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name right now. You can handle a gun, I assume?”

“It’s Flavick. Egnaril. Learn your crew’s name, Commander, it might be a good idea. And yeah, I can handle a gun. You think I’m stupid?” came a rough voice.

Maxien sighed. He didn’t have time for this. “I got a distress call from an Outpost nearby, and we’re gonna go in and see what’s up. I don’t care if you’re stupid as long as you can watch my back. It looked hairy down there.”

“I thought hairy backs were a human thing.”

“Flavick,” Maxien said, feeling like his own father. “I don’t have time for smart aleck comments. Are you willing to lend me a hand?”

There was a moment of silence as Flavick seemed to consider his options.

“Sir yes sir!” he replied, sarcastic as they come.

Maxien rolled his eyes, and jogged to the elevator to stop by his weapons locker. This time, he decided, he would have a sniper rifle.

He had to drive the shuttle to dirt-side by himself, Flavick claiming ignorance of the controls as he picked his teeth with slightly too-sharp claws and no other officers being available for the mission. Unfortunately, driving shuttles had never been his strong suit. At the academy, they’d pegged him as a ground troop kind of man, and he’d accepted their judgement. While he had planned on dropping onto Braccia quietly as he was able, the following crash as he just barely avoided a copse of trees drew the attention of the enemy.

“Be ready,” he murmured, half to himself, as he opened the shuttle doors.

“Don’t be bossy,” Flavick admonished, jumping from the shuttle with a shot gun in hand.

Maxien shook his head wearily and leapt out after him, directly into a fire fight.

The group that was firing at them was 10 strong, of varying species, who seemed to be fighting with reckless abandon that simply made no sense. The armor they wore was weaker than his own, and their shields came down quickly, but there were many of them. And they held no value in their own lives.

He took shelter behind a tree, breathing quickly, and took out his sniper rifle. As Flavick stormed forward, shouting gleefully and spraying bullets at the crowd, Maxien took the time to locate more enemies, further away, who seemed to be much more capable in battle. Each shot overheated his rifle, so he had to be careful. Fortunately, Flavick was more than distracting enough to keep the closer, stupider enemies occupied.

The crack of his rifle firing split the air, but was drowned in the array of gunfire, dying screams, and Flavick’s boyish laughter. The enemy dropped, and from what Maxien could see through his scope, relinquished a pretty high caliber weapon as he died. Good.

He took out his pistol, and started taking pot shots at the squad nearby. Flavick had nearly eliminated them, proving that even with a shot gun and an absolute abandon, the Gunnery Chief could be pretty efficient in his own right. When the rifle had cooled and the squad before them was finished, Maxien called Flavick back.

“What do you want?” he asked, irritably.

“There are enemies in those towers,” he said quietly, gesturing with his rifle. “I took out one of them, he seemed to have some heavy armaments. You wanna try to snipe them with me or keep head butting things until they stop moving?”

Flavick grinned. “You’re funnier than they said you were, pal.” He clapped his superior on the back. “I’ll draw fire, take out any idiots who stand in front of me, and you keep sniping.”

Maxien looked at the field, noting the doors to the station. They were propped open by some crates that the assailants had dragged over, and there was distinct movement beyond them. If he waited too long behind the tree, they would come to him, and he couldn’t defend as well as he liked to believe when he was looking down a scope.

“Don’t worry!” Flavick said, reading some of the doubt on Maxien’s face. “I’m almost as good at killing people as I am pretty!”

With that, he was sprinting down the slope, and taking cover behind one of the crates. Maxien could only shake his head, but he found that with every annoying comment Flavick made, he actually became more tolerable. He counted his blessings that he had been raised with several annoying brothers, as well.

He calmly set to business. A crack--a fallen foe--a pause. A crack--a fallen foe--a pause. Before long, each of the heavily armed enemies up above had been taken out with clean headshots, and he could comfortably follow Flavick’s lead. The shouting and gunfire hadn’t sounded very positive from his position, but so far, none of Flavick’s fights had been entirely silent. He hoped he never had to do a covert operation with this kid.

“How’s it going? I would’ve expected you to have taken the entire base by now, kid,” Maxien grumbled, crouching behind a crate next to his companion.

“Yeah, I thought about it, but then you wouldn’t have to do any of the hard work. What’s the point of having superiors if they can’t--” His sentence was interrupted by a shot to his shields, and a small yelp. He fired over the crate, spurring a yelp from an enemy, and continued, “If they can’t do all the annoying stuff for you, right?”

Maxien peeked over the crate. More men to fight. More heavily armed than the last batch. It appeared that, whoever was in charge here, had dispatched the rookies to try to take them out as soon as they arrived, and reserved the heavier forces in case they were more than the enemies reckoned for. With another cursory glance, he noted a lot of dead turians on the ground. Some of the smaller bastards were using the dead as cover.

“Do you think there might be a back door?” Maxien wondered allowed. He’d picked up the habit of mumbling to himself as a method of appearing mildly stupid and suspicious during his year under cover, and it turned out that such things were hard to break. “If we could flank them…”

Maxien whipped out his omni-tool and checked for a basic blueprint of the station. He thanked the spirits that Braccia was turian, and that he could access such things in preparation for his inauguration into the Spectres. There was indeed a back door, and the heat sensors that the VI in his armor picked up said that it was less heavily defended than the front.

“And here I thought the brass were a bunch of ass holes,” Flavick said, laughing.

“Brass holes?” Maxien replied, absentmindedly, as he checked out the side of the building. It was surrounded in scrub brush and some basic forest leading into the gardens that fed the troops here.

Flavick continued to laugh as Maxien rolled from the cover of the crates to skirt around the edge of the building. His companion followed in hot pursuit, still taking shots at those still defending the front room.

They encountered a few unprepared enemies who appeared to be digging up something in the fields.

After sniping them from a ways away, Maxien felt comfortable loping across to the gardens, with Flavick trailing along, vocally confused.

“Shouldn’t we be storming the base and all?” Flavick asked, sounding dissatisfied with Maxien’s choice to stop and investigate.

“They aren’t burying their fallen--this isn’t their world,” Maxien mumbled, kneeling down next to the fresh corpse and the pile of dirt it had been tampering with.

“So what are they doing?”

Maxien brushed some of the dirt aside with his hands, and revealed a thick, grey worm, writhing gently in the loam. As it was uncovered, it released a foul stench and started moving faster, trying to burrow back into the earth and escape.

He stepped on it, panicking, not sure what to do with this creature. The worm started to secrete a liquid that made his shoe start smoking, much to his distress. Lifting up his foot, he shot at what he could only guess was the worm’s head, and it stopped moving.

“What the fuck was that?” Flavick asked, clearly disgusted.

“Bio warfare? I’m not sure. We should check out this place for survivors before we...figure this out. Spirits that smelled nasty,” Maxien said, kicking dirt over the body of the worm. “I hope it’s dead.”

“Whatever it’s doing, I think it’s working,” Flavick said, gesturing toward the garden.

Every plant was dead, it seemed. Every single one. They were various levels of brown and black, but all looked incredibly inedible. There were small mounds of dirt where it looked as though other worms had been buried, near the crops.

“Why would they bother taking over an outpost and then just...render it unlivable?” Maxien mused, his face a picture of confusion.

The two turians shook their heads, and marched back to the base. While they couldn’t fight the dead plants, they knew they could do some good by putting bullets in those that had gone out of their way to kill them. Perhaps, Maxien hoped, they could find an explanation for the baffling thing they had just observed.

They rounded the back of the building, and were able to quickly take out the 4 enemies that awaited them there. The back of the base appeared to function as a storage center or warehouse, giving Maxien uncomfortable feelings of familiarity. The half-light, the stacked pallets--no, he couldn’t think of that. If he started picturing his dead friends in the middle of every mission for the rest of his life, he would never be able to function. He shook his head to clear his mind of the memories.

He would pay them homage another day.

He lead Flavick through the base, keeping a sharp eye out for data pads or anything useful to determine the purpose of the attack on Braccia, until they came across the entry room which they had been blocked from. The enemies that had been firing so mercilessly upon them before were still peering out the front, apparently unaware of the danger that lurked behind them.

Flavick leapt ahead, far more quietly than Maxien would have ever expected from the obnoxious gunnery chief, and snatched one of the enemies from behind cover, bashing his head into the cement flooring of the base. This alerted the others to their presence, of course, but Maxien was more than ready for them. He was able to take out their shields quickly, killing three of them before his gun overheated. Flavick, meanwhile, had tackled another, shooting him directly in the face as he straddled the other’s chest.

This left two more, who were crouching behind cover. Maxien signalled to Flavick, and they flanked the remaining two, and took them out efficiently and without damage.

“Sick fucks,” Flavick growled, his subharmonics reflecting a complexity of emotion Maxien would have never expected from such an individual. Flavick spat on the corpse of an asari who had taken shelter behind a dead turian who had manned the outpost.

Maxien gestured to Flavick, and the two marched up the stairs of the base, to where he knew from his blueprint scan was the main office of the base.

He still didn’t know why Braccia had been attacked. Braccia was a habitable garden planet that hadn’t evolved any sentient life. Turians had set up an outpost, lacking the impetus to found a colony on it before all the scans could be complete, but not willing the other species in the galaxy to get their claws on it. The plantlife supported dextro-based foods, and over all it had seemed like an ideal place to set up a new farming colony. But no colony had been established, yet. Just one base, with a few soldiers and a garden. Scouts came and went, surveying the planet every now and then, and all reports were filed through the office in the base.

Maxien opened the door to the office, and found a startled salarian.

“You--!” he shouted, ducking behind the desk.

“Don’t shoot!” Maxien commanded as Flavick reached for his gun.

He hunkered down, and grabbed the salarian by the collar of his coat. The salarian was wild eyed, twitching, and very weak. He also seemed to be unarmed.

Maxien threw him into the chair, took out his gun as a threatening gesture, and sat on the desk across from the frightened salarian.

“Are you in charge of this operation?” he asked, his voice a low growl that had been perfected in his training as a criminal.

“No no no,” said the salarian, his words coming out like rapid fire. “I am merely an agent of fate, you see! Haha! I am no great Prophet! I am...I am a missionary! For the Cause! For the Beast!” His words were punctuated with manic laughter. Maxien had never been wonderful at alien biology, but the salarian looked distinctly ill.

“Slow down. Explain. What is your cause?” he asked slowly.

“Agerae!” the salarian shrieked, piercing the air with the unfamiliar word. “I am Ageran, and those who oppose us! Those who oppose us will tremble!”

“A political group, maybe?” Flavick suggested.

“Politics! Ridiculous! If the Prophet heard you speak this way...Ahhh...No force can stop the spread of the Beast, the spread of Agerae across the galaxy! Tremble!”

“Sounds like a religion to me. Extremists,” Maxien said, turning his head to address Flavick. He turned back to the manic salarian. “Tell me about Agerae.”

“N-no! You are not ready! The Prophet…” The salarian began to croon, cradling his head in his hands before snapping back up and staring Maxien in the eye with a ferocious intensity that Maxien had only seen in rabid animals before. “You will learn nothing from me, heathen!”

Before Maxien could react, the salarian snatched the pistol from his hands, and shot himself in the head.

“Shit!” Flavick said, diving forward.

Maxien only stared at the dead salarian for a moment, before bending down to pick up his weapon. He was left speechless in the aftermath of the impromptu suicide, his mind riddled with questions he wondered if he ought to have asked first. He shook his head slowly, and turned toward the door, assuming that Flavick would follow him.

Once back on the ship, Maxien took the time in his cabin to record the events of the day on his personal console, in order to submit the report to the Council. He felt that, despite the salarian’s manic speech, there had been something he had truly been trying to communicate. Galactic domination by a group of religious extremists? Well, it sounded silly, but some of the salarian’s words had rung with sincerity. Even if the galaxy did not take stock in the religion, those who were in it certainly did.

If a Spectre’s job was all about preserving galactic stability, and he was soon to become a Spectre, then Maxien felt that he was duty obligated to look into this.


End file.
